The Cure's Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me Poll

perfect as it is

sprawling, daring and FUN

sbdy OTM upthread about this being the band of having the most awesome time in a studio - one of these moments when touched by grace everything you dabble with turns to gold. Maybe not my favorite, but this is really the ultimate Cure album.

i agree with geir actually, as far as this being one of the cure's worst records. definitely long and sprawling, but in the most erratic way. i never did quite warm to this band when it was in lucky dip mode. i much prefer the unity of sound they managed to encapsulate across albums such as 'disintegration', where they channeled fewer and more specific moods and nailed them. robert smith in uber-zealous vocal mode is also a little irksome for me these days. and as far as the whole juxtaposition of dark and light shades from song to song goes, i think 'wish' did a much better job. and that album had awesome production that holds up really nicely. 'kiss me...' seems a little dated in its sound, and whereas cure records previous to this almost seem contemporary due to the manner in which their fundamental feel and sonic textures have been recreated by newer bands countless times since, this one finds itself as a bit of an odd man out - sounding a little too singular and isolated in its era for its own good.

AS IF JUST LIKE HEAVEN ISN'T GOING TO WIN! MOST PREDICTABLE ILX POLL EVER

I don't care what wins, I just hope every song gets at least one vote.

THIS IS A MOSTLY BORING RECORD HELLO

I don't remember how even half these songs go and I don't care, honestly.

Bimb!

Have you ever heard "Gerry and the Holograms" ?

Yes! Didn't you see I posted on that New Order thread already about it? Ah, time zones...

No I didn't! Even upped it to m'website.

(Increased Resistance = "Murder" too!)

Which thread, anyroad?

I remember listening to this for the first time on headphones in a record shop in Amsterdam when it came out. I wasn't so sure about the Cure's poppier direction at the time, The Head on the Door didn't do that much for me (and still doesn't)... within minutes I was sold, "The Kiss" was such an overwhelming experience on first listen. I also remember seeing mysterious little posters with just "Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me" scrawled all over them before it came out...

This album was a watershed event in my life.

The only imperfect moment is Fight.

i listened to the deluxe remastered version of this album for this poll and was blown away. sure it would have been an excellent single album but there is very little fat on this record.

doing that four song thing from above but taking out "Just Like Heaven" because it really isn't far, here is what i come up with:

A1 The Kiss 6:14
B2 How Beautiful You Are... 5:14
C3 Hot Hot Hot!!! 3:33
C2 All I Want 5:19

i'm going to play it again!

*fair

I voted for "Catch"

i just voted for four songs but now i see it is each letter so (finally read this whole thread):

A1 "The Kiss"
B2 "How Beautiful You Are..."
C2 "All I Want"
D2 "The Perfect Girl"

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

boy are people hearing things in 'like cockatoos' that i'm not. NINE people think it's the best song?!

well OBVIOUSLY the answer is 'if only tonight we could sleep' - fucking brilliance

the two 6+ minute ones are also stone superb

12. "One More Time" – 4:29 1

This solitary vote makes me sad.

This poll had the correct winner. A great song from a not so overall satisfactory album.

Head on The Door and this; a 2 year absoloute peak i'm saying. an astonishing run of songs in a crazy short time as good as any bands' ever.

tbh you could say that about the entirety of the band's output up to that point and arguably their output for the next 5 years

C what the hell this is impossible

great remix of this iirc

Somebody should do a poll of the Kiss Me b-sides, which were all completely great. The vinyl version of this I bought came with a bright orange third disc of all the b-sides, and I listened to that way more than the actual album! A Japanese Dream, Breathe, A Chain of Flowers, Snow in Summer, Sugar Girl.

AJD vs ACoF

"Snow in Summer" is one of my favorite Cure songs.

lol apparently I did do an "all b-sides" poll

WILL THE MADNESS NEVER STOP??? (The Cure B-Side poll)

Probably my favorite Cure era. I agree the B-Sides are all great. It was a very prolific and creative time for them.

heh, the all b-sides poll is too broad! just kiss me. I feel they kinda point the way towards disintegration.

Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me was an album that came out just as the CD became 'the format' that really worked with the extra time. This and Staring/Standing on a Beach were all over the place when I was a freshman in college.

It's kind of weird to see "Torture" or "All I Want" with no votes, but there is so many really good songs on this CD, it's not hard to see why it might not get a vote. It's a cool song.

except ironically Kiss Me didn't fit on a CD so they left Hey You!!! off

.. because that was the "title" track, sort of.

Somebody should do a poll of the Kiss Me b-sides, which were all completely great. The vinyl version of this I bought came with a bright orange third disc of all the b-sides, and I listened to that way more than the actual album! A Japanese Dream, Breathe, A Chain of Flowers, Snow in Summer, Sugar Girl.

― the girl from spirea x (f. hazel), Monday, 13 June 2011 19:51

I went through a period of listening to the orange vinyl b-sides disc more than the album.

except ironically Kiss Me didn't fit on a CD so they left Hey You!!! off

― reallysmoothmusic (Jamie_ATP), Tuesday, 14 June 2011 09:06

and left "Fight" on it for some reason...

just listened through and even fights not THAT bad - how'd they do that? can't believe i hadn't listened to this in so long, every song on the album deserved a vote.

i'd dare say it's sign o the times good, all eyez on me good, exile on main street etc etc good some artist/bands just go through a period where they couldn't play a crap note if they tried. every b-side they recorded around this period was awesome as well

yeah, from 1985 to 1989 they could do no wrong.

I started listening to "The Kiss" to make a point about The Cure on another thread and I think I'm basically just going to play this entire album through

Wisdom.

we did a "favorite KM^3 side" poll, didn't we (ps: the answer is 3)

oh man "One More Time" is just so great, how he slides from his howl into his falsetto

I got into The Cure via 'The Cure In Orange' and the 'Standing On The Beach' compilation, so when I was initially buying and getting into Cure albums, I investigated everything from the beginning up until 1985 first and then everything else afterwards... this would have been in around 2000, so 'Bloodflowers' would have just been released or being close to being released.

As a result, I've always kinda had a preference towards The Cure's work from Three Imaginary Boys up until and including The Head On The Door. I like Disintegration, but I've always felt its CD configuration to be a touch overlong and have always preferred to listen to it in its vinyl/cassette incarnation (which admittedly is quite a long album in itself). Wish, too, I've always felt could do with a bit of a trim.

With Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, I know that excess is the point, but I've always felt that it would have been of great benefit to the best of the material here if it had been condensed into something a little more easier to digest, like The Top or The Head On The Door. Problem is, I've attempted to scale this down into a single many many times, drawing up loads of different tracklistings and I can never quite make up my mind. So it's an album that I end up dipping in and out of, rather than listen to as a whole. I'm not one of these people that dislikes double albums either: I can listen to all two hours of Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness and enjoy the ride completely. I just don't think The Cure are much good at making long albums.

i think this is a good time to post this, though i don't agree with all of it:

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/125241-masters-of-the-form-the-cure-1987-kiss-me-kiss-me-kiss-me

and one of the comments:

kafka

the amazing thing about the cure’s popularity is that they never had a publicist or someone from a record company whos job it was to get them publicity. They didn’t want publicity. I think Robert Smith would do a couple interviews every album release and that was it.

I worked at elektra in the 80’s and 90’s and the feeling was - these guys are weird - the lead singer wears lipstick (that was really weird back then) So we just left them alone. They made the record label loads of money because no money had to be spent to promote them - they had their fan base and it was a cult phenomenon

1 year ago

i think the Cure just had too many ideas around this time that this album had to be a double. they could have made a even better record if they replaced a few songs with some of their amazing b-sides from this era. it could have been another classic. i think i like this album more than The Head on the Door but not positive about that statement.

Yeah, I can completely understand why this album ended up being a double. Not to knock the core trio of Smith/Gallup/Tolhurst that made the Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography trio of records (not forgetting, of course, Matthieu Hartley on Seventeen Seconds also), but with The Head On The Door, I think that for the first time in the bands lifetime, The Cure had a line-up which could pretty much turn their hand successfully to all styles of Cure music. Not to mention that they gelled into a pretty damn impressive musical unit, and of course they looked the part too (I could never have imagined Phil Thornalley as a long-serving member of The Cure, really, whatever his production, writing and playing skills). With all of this in mind, I think it's natural that they would have wanted to see how far they could go with this line-up, and Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me ended up being the result.

I really would have loved to have seen what kind of album that line-up circa The Top (Smith/Thornalley/Thompson/Tolhurst/Anderson) would have made if they'd made another album. A lot of other Cure line-ups seem to have a 'defining' album to them... whether it's the Smith/Gallup/Tolhurst trio that made Pornography, the Smith/Gallup/Thompson/Tolhurst/Williams five-piece that made The Head On The Door, the Smith/Gallup/Thompson/O'Donnell/Williams line-up that made Disintegration (bit of a one-album wonder, that line-up), or even the Smith/Gallup/Bamonte/O'Donnell/Cooper line-up that made Bloodflowers... but that 1984 line-up just seems to be, like, lost in the mists of time...

So, following my recent relisten of Head on the Door, I tackled the mighty KMKMKM next. I enjoyed it a lot more overall, I think it hangs together as a coherent album better than Head... despite being so much longer, and the highlights are many and continue to reveal themselves anew despite the fact I must've heard the album hundreds of times now (The Snakepit and Torture in particular stuck with me on this listen). I still have my criticisms: the weakest moments for me are gathered near the end of the record - I could do without One More Time, The Perfect Girl and A Thousand Years - but Shiver & Shake and Fight help pick up the slack somewhat. Boris Williams is a monster drummer and his presence is sorely missed. Though I'd been forewarned about the relative weakness of the bonus disc on the reissue of Kiss Me, I found the early instrumental demos pretty fascinating listening (if not something I expect I'll return to very often).

It's funny, I love the 1980-1984 run so much that I struggle to identify a weak moment on any of those records yet I can quite clearly pick what doesn't work for me out of the 1985-1992 material despite thinking that period represents the band at the height of their powers. The good bits are frequent and astonishingly good however so I guess it all evens out.

(slight clarification)

"Boris Williams is a monster drummer and his presence is sorely missed."

These days, you know what I mean.

I am posting under trying circumstances (er, small children yanking on my arms/ability to form coherent thoughts).

I worked at elektra in the 80’s and 90’s and the feeling was - these guys are weird - the lead singer wears lipstick (that was really weird back then) So we just left them alone. They made the record label loads of money because no money had to be spent to promote them - they had their fan base and it was a cult phenomenon

I remember Robert Smith complaining in the 80s that the Cure were sent on long and far-reaching tours (Japan, Australia/NZ, Latin America etc) because the record company had worked out that music fans in those countries love any group that visits there and become devoted record-buyers - and only the Cure was prepared to do it.

Of course, you can never trust what he says in interviews.

It's always nice to read someone love 1980-1984, as to my ears the band were still purging the glum stuff that they would integrate more successfully starting in 1985.